Profile Information
James M. Burns
Calhoun Lemon Professor of History
Contact
Department of History
Office: Hardin Hall 127
Phone: Hardin Hall 127
Website: https://burnsj.people.clemson.edu/
Email: burnsj@clemson.edu
Education
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara (1998)
Courses
Africa, British Empire, History of Cinema
Research Interests
World History; Africa since 1850; Empire; Transnational history; Global History; Film Studies; Popular Culture
Professor Burns is a specialist in African history, British Imperial history, and the social history of film. His essay 'The African Bioscope--Cinema and culture in the Colonial City' (2005) was republished in Fall 2021 in a special issue of Black Camera celebrating the past thirty years of cinema scholarship in Africa.
His recent publications include
- 'The Western in Colonial Africa' in The Routledge Companion to Transnational Westerns, forthcoming 2027
- 'Movie Mad Island: Cinema and Society in Colonial Mauritius, 1897-1968' in Monsoon: the Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, May 2026
- 'Cinema in the British Indian Ocean: from silent to sound' in The Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture, Volume 23, Issues 1-2, 2025
- 'Cinema-going in the South Asian Diaspora: Indian films, entrepreneurs and audiences in Port-of-Spain Trinidad and Durban, South Africa' in The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories (2024)
- 'Comparing historical cinema cultures: The case of the British West Indies' in The Journal for Media History (Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis), October 2020
He is the author of several books, including Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press, 2002), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine, and A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, co-authored with Robert O. Collins (Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2nd edition 2013). His monograph Global Bollywood: Cinema and Society in the South Asian Diaspora is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working on a follow-up volume to his book Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895-1940, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. This new project, Closing the Empire, examines the social history of cinema in the British Commonwealth from 1940 to 1970.
